1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunication, and more particularly to the field of hybrid mobile ad-hoc networks.
2. Description of Related Art
Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are highly desirable to facilitate communication and message passing among mobile network nodes, for example those installed in vehicles and the like. Dynamically changing network topology due to node mobility and the resulting lack of a fixed network infrastructure make maintaining end-to-end connectivity in such networks a notoriously difficult problem despite tremendous effort.
A variety of routing protocols have been proposed, among them Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), and GPS-based routing protocols.
Each of OLSR, DSDV, AODV, and DSR requires nodes to maintain information about network topology. However, the dynamically and rapidly-changing nature of mobile network topology requires a flood of control messages among the nodes to maintain updated position information. Network bandwidth is quickly overwhelmed. As a result, such network protocols are inherently unscaleable.
GPS-based routing protocols tend not to require global topology information. However, mobile nodes make routing decisions based upon knowledge of neighboring nodes, i.e. nodes within a one-hop distance with respect to transmission range. However, maintaining such knowledge would be extremely expensive in terms of network and computational resources in highly mobile environments.
Fundamentally, previously proposed solutions do not use enough of the available information to optimize routing and network management decisions. Therefore, a mobile ad-hoc network capable of maintaining end-to-end communication with limited overhead would be desirable in the art.